Vox chose this Monday to avoid a clash with the Pope when the party was asked about the meeting that the Pontiff held last November with the leadership of the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE). In it, Leo XIV warned of the rise of the extreme right and expressed his concern about political groups of this ideology “that seek to instrumentalize the Church” and “win the Catholic vote.” In a press conference at the headquarters of his formation, the general secretary of Vox, Ignacio Garriga, has chosen to doubt the veracity of the Pope’s words, whose verbatimity was dictated to this newspaper by two sources familiar with the meeting. “I want to highlight what EL PAÍS says what Pope León says,” he clarified. However, Garriga has implicitly admitted that the opinion that the Pontiff has about his party is negative when he has assured: “I am convinced that if Pope Leo listens first-hand to what Vox says… We defend social justice, we defend policies aimed at the common good, we defend the defense of life from conception to natural death…”
Garriga has not included in his list, which presumably coincides with the Pope’s social and political discourse, Vox’s position on the regularization plan for hundreds of thousands of immigrants that the Government approved this January at the request of numerous social organizations and institutions, including the Church itself. Catholic. The leader of the party, Santiago Abascal, did not hide his discomfort and went so far as to assure that there are “bishops, probably a minority, who are doing business with immigration.” But it is one thing to attack some ecclesiastics and even certain bishops and another to attack Leo XIV, even though he is not liked by Vox, nor was his predecessor, Pope Francis. For this reason, Garriga, a well-known member of Opus Dei, has preferred to avoid the clash and attribute the news to those who seek to “confront, complicate the debate.”
For her part, the first vice president of the Government and Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, defined the Pope’s message to the bishops this Monday as “very timely.” “The Pope’s call and wake-up call is aimed at making us aware that support for these forces represents a threat to democracy,” Montero declared to the media during his visit to the Cadiz town of Grazalema. The vice president added that the Pontiff’s words point out the path to be followed by Catholics and warned that the extreme right brings “risks, poverty and the curtailment of freedoms.”
On November 17, the executive commission of the EEC – made up of nine bishops – made its first official visit with Leo XIV to the Vatican, six months after his election. After a first speech by the president of the Spanish prelates, Archbishop Luis Argüello, the Pope intervened and went straight to the point to convey that his greatest concern at this moment in Spain “is the extreme right ideology.” This message is important because it marks the line that the Pope wants the Spanish episcopate to follow in the face of the discourse of parties such as Vox and ultra-conservative groups against the reception and regularization of immigrants.
“The Pope sees that the extreme right uses believers for their purposes,” a prelate tells this newspaper. In their speeches, these groups accuse bishops of betraying the faithful by supporting the “anti-Christian” policies of the Government as an “agreed compensation” for cases of pedophilia or “as a consequence of the aid system” they receive.
During the meeting, the Pope pointed out other of his major concerns in Spain: the management of the clerical pedophilia scandal and recommended that the bishops close an agreement with the Government. And so they did. Shortly after arriving in Spain, they agreed with the Government to sign an agreement to compensate victims of abuse under state guardianship. The agreement was signed on January 8. Several weeks later, on the 27th of the same month, the bishops supported the immigrant regularization plan approved by the Executive in the Council of Ministers and harshly attacked by Vox. The Church, it should be noted, has been one of the institutions that has put the most pressure in recent years to implement this measure to resolve the situation of more than half a million migrants.
From that moment, parties like Vox and other ultra-Catholic entities went from harsh criticism against the bishops to direct attacks. “The entire oligarchy hates the Spanish people,” a member of the Vox leadership published on X when the president of the bishops published a video in which he supported the regularization of immigrants. Falange Española de las JONS went one step further and responded on the same social network with another video created with artificial intelligence with an image of the president of the bishops mutating into a smiling demon among flames. With the accusation that “the Episcopal Conference is not the Church” and that “it is more with the devil than with the poor.”
